


Check Your Vital Signs (Is Your Head Screwed On Man?)

by Criminally_Capricious



Category: Arthur Christmas (2011)
Genre: Alcohol, Bryony & Arthur friendship, Sibling Bonding, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, dont drink your feelings Steve
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-28
Updated: 2020-12-28
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:14:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28374489
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Criminally_Capricious/pseuds/Criminally_Capricious
Summary: “Are you coming to the Boxing Day bash, Sir? We’ve been wondering where you’d got to!”“Oh, I don’t know about that, Shelfley. Very busy, you understand.”His plan had actually been to slip into the kitchens and pilfer the brandy he knew they stocked in the back, then spend a quiet night in his quarters getting to grips with the massive headache of paperwork that Arthur’s Christmas rebellion had incurred while getting very, very drunk -- but he wasn’t about to tell her that.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 7





	Check Your Vital Signs (Is Your Head Screwed On Man?)

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! I Love this film because the dysfunctional family dynamics are so much fun to examine! I just wanted to do a wee post-canon exploration of how Steve comes to terms with that huuuuge blow, and reconnects a little with Arthur because he deserves a supportive Big Brother and we know Steve has that capacity! It's just buried in like, twelve layers of Issues. 
> 
> Title is from Dirtpicker by Post Animal!

_"Steve, you deserve to be Santa”._

He dodged a slightly drunken elf (“Sorry, Sir!”) wearing a paper crown and tried to exorcise the cyclical thought by concentrating on the damage report he had requested, detailing every ding and scrape the S1 had suffered on Christmas morning. Nothing too drastic, thankfully - mostly cosmetic damage to the paint job and a few dozen cracked projection fixtures on her portside belly, which would be fixed in no time at all.   
  
His biggest concern had been potential damage to the flight systems after their impromptu delivery run, and Dad’s enthusiastic attempt to steer her into the hangar wall as many times as possible, but all diagnostics had come back clear. Good news for Dad. 

He fired off a couple of emails as he navigated the corridors, barely glancing up as he knew the layout of the Polar base so well by now that he felt he could walk it blindfolded without so much as stubbing his toe. The first was to the head of the specialised engineering department that was responsible for all maintenance and repairs to the ship to confirm his receipt of the damage report, and then another to the Hangar crews informing them that the S1 would be under repair starting tomorrow.   
  


It was mostly formality, since the hangar and the engineering department communicated freely and enthusiastically with each other, especially when it came to the pride and joy of the North Pole the S1, but the paperwork needed official approval and it was important to keep meticulous record of even minor damages when it involved such a delicate and still nail-bitingly experimental vessel. 

_You deserve to be Santa,_ the voice echoed again in the back of his mind, and he quickly scrolled to the first unread email he found and clicked on it, opening the attached spreadsheet from the R&D department without reading the subject line. 

He knew right away that Yulie Brevanof -a relatively recent transfer to R&D from the Manufacturing department - was responsible for the formatting because almost every cell was a very slightly different shade of yellow, which created a sensation similar to staring directly into the sun with no sunglasses on. He would have to send her another memo about readability; she was gaining a reputation within the department for causing migraines. 

Grimacing, he squinted at the column headers and turned the corner into the south wing towards the recreational areas, where the muffled sounds of the Boxing Day party echoed strangely through the ice.  
  
“Sir!” 

He glanced up and blinked, still dazzled by Yulie’s aggressive colour coding, and recognised the elf approaching by the bleached blonde bristle of hair. She was out of her tactical gear and instead sporting a plain green shirt and standard issue trousers, cupping what looked like a plastic wine glass full of orange juice that looked ridiculously large in her tiny hands. 

The mad wrapping elf, _Brandy or Briar- no, it was Birony Somebody-or-other,_ was half jogging towards him, and Steve wondered if it would look too bad to do an about-face and run away.  
  


“Bryony Shelfley, Sir, we met yesterday, Sir!”   
  


Yes, Shelfley, that was it. She tried to fling up a salute, almost dropped her drink and fumbled to catch it before she spilled any. He forced a smile that didn’t even try to reach his eyes.  
  
“Yes, I remember. Gift Wrap support.” He said it with only slightly more derision than was polite, before pointedly looking back down at his HoHo.   
  
The graph that Yulie had included beneath the spreadsheet was just as garish as the rest of the rest of the document, and he closed the attachment in defeat. The subject line of the email turned out to be: ' _Cost Projections For The New Year! :)',_ with three christmas tree emojis, two firework emojis and a shooting star. 

Perhaps a memo on email etiquette, too.  
  
  
“Are you coming to the Boxing Day bash, Sir? We’ve been wondering where you’d got to!”   
  
Bryony had not taken the hint and had fallen into step with him as best she could, half jogging again to keep up with his stride.   
  
“Oh, I don’t know about that, Shelfley.” he said blandly, “Very busy, you understand.”   
  
His plan had actually been to slip into the kitchens and pilfer the brandy he knew they stocked in the back, then spend a quiet night in his quarters getting to grips with the massive headache of paperwork that Arthur’s christmas rebellion had incurred while also getting very very drunk -- but he wasn’t about to tell her that. 

“Pish!” she said, and his eyebrows shot up. 

“...Excuse me?” he demanded, staring down at her. She stared right back at him, unabashed and still trotting along. She took a sip of her drink through one of several brightly coloured bendy straws, swallowed, and said again, 

  
“ _Pish!_ It’s _Boxing Day,_ Sir, you can’t work on _Boxing Day!_ It’s against the - um, something.-”   
  
She furrowed her brow.   
  
“-the Geneva Conventions, maybe.”   
  


He wasn’t sure if it was the slurring or the rudeness that tipped him off, but he belatedly realised that her orange juice was probably not exclusively orange juice.

“It’s against _something_ like that to not have days off! Ever!” she continued, and he groaned and stuffed his HoHo into his back pocket. 

The sound of the party was much louder now, and he realised that reaching the kitchens unharassed had probably been a bit of a pipe dream to begin with. 

“It’s definitely _not_ a violation of the Geneva Conventions, Shelfley, and I’m afraid I don’t have the time. Lots to do, paperwork to sign. _Messes_ to clean up.”   
_The mess that you helped make,_ he thought.

The next corner revealed a corridor filled with elves clustered in groups, laughing and chatting animatedly and clearly taking a break from the party that was going on beyond the heavy firedoors at the far end. Tinsel debris was draped over the light fittings and someone had pasted paper snowflakes all over the walls, but the most noticeable adornment was the dozens of mismatched rugs that lined the floor in a patchwork of garish patterns. He paused mid-step, bewildered. Bryony bumped into his leg and giggled, and several of the party-goers glanced up, acknowledged him with a staggered chorus of “Sir!" before turning back to their conversations.

“What,” Steve enunciated slowly “is _this._ ”   
  
At the end of the hall, the doors swung open and pulsing music flooded the corridor from the Games and Recreation center, which was the most convenient party venue due to its placement sandwiched between the barracks and the kitchens. Several elves tumbled out in peals of laughter holding paper cups, and the music dulled again as the doors hissed slowly shut on their hydraulic hinges. 

Bryony waited until they thunked closed against the frame to explain the makeshift carpet.  
  
  
“Floor was a bit slipp’ry Sir, melted down a wee bit yesterday - it’s fine now! All frozen solid!” she added quickly as he blanched and reached for his HoHo. "Already put in a request with Maintenance."  
  
  
He hesitated for a moment at her assurance, then frowned down at the ice at his feet, which now that he looked closely did begin to look a little uneven before it was obscured further down the hall by the frayed edge of a crochet quilt. He took out the HoHo anyway and opened his emails to draft an inquiry about the restoration schedule for this area - and startled as it was plucked out of his hands. 

“Stop that! It’s _fine_ , it’ll be resurfaced tomorrow morning!”  
  
  
Bryony dodged his hand as he reached to snatch the phone back, and he stood and stared at her with a baffled kind of disbelief   
  
The back of his neck began to feel hot as he grappled with the sudden spike of anger. His mood had been smouldering somewhere around his solar plexus since the moment he had woken up that morning, mollified a little by the constant distractions that he had found in his work. He felt his momentum stalling as he tried to muster an appropriately scathing reprimand and came up empty. 

If she could feel his rising temper in his silence she didn’t show it, shoving the hand holding the HoHo behind her back and taking another sip of her spiked juice, smiling at him like he was some mate of hers and not her Commanding Officer.  
  
More than anything in that moment, he wanted to lift her up by the back of the shirt and shake her ‘til she dropped the damned thing and spilled her stupid drink, then go and get quietly hammered in his room - but he was extremely aware that there were witnesses several feet away and that rattling their colleague around probably wouldn’t look good on him. 

...No matter how satisfying it would be. 

Instead he clenched his fist and counted down from five, slowly crouching to her eye level.  
  


“Shelfley.” he said. “ _Bryony_ . Thank you so very, _very_ much for the invitation,-” he hoped she could hear how hard he was gritting his teeth, and poured as much venom as he could into his simperingly patronising delivery,  
  


“-but I really am _extraordinarily_ busy with all of the damage control I need to do to - you know, suppressing highly compromising video footage, signing paperwork, writing new paperwork, attempting to mitigate the _staggering disaster of whatever yesterday was.”_   
  


_And if just one more thing comes between me and that brandy I am going to strip naked and run screaming into the tundra,_ he didn't add.   
  
He took a shuddering breath in, held it for a second, and thrust out his palm face up. 

“And I will be needing that back. Right now.”  
  


She raised her eyebrow at him, the one with the silver ring, but before she could respond the sound of the doors swinging open again caught her attention, loud music filling the hallway again. Then her face lit up and she didn’t even spare Steve a second glance as she started towards the Rec room.

Through the doors tumbled another gaggle of elves in party hats, festooned with baubles and tinsel, and behind them being dragged laughing by the hand was Arthur.   
He had changed his jumper, and his new one was blue with geometric snowflake patterns knitted in even intervals all over. The front said, in red capital letters, “LET IT SNOW”, and Steve recognised it as Mum’s handiwork. She had knitted him one too, mostly for the sake of tradition and knowing that it would spend its life in his wardrobe, unworn.   
It was the thought that counted, he supposed.

Arthur was wearing a pair of felt reindeer antlers with tiny bells on them, and when he saw Bryony he quickly disentangled himself, tripping over several feet, and leaned down to scoop her into a one armed hug. The antlers immediately fell off his head and were scooped up from the floor by another sozzled elf, who slipped in through the rec room doors just before they shut behind him. If he didn't know better, Steve would have assumed they had been friends for years.  
  


“Bryony! Where did you go, I was about to come looking! They want to hear about the lions, and I said ‘well Bryony would be able to tell you better than me’ because, well, I was screaming most of the time and I think I blacked out for a lot of it anyway, but you were brilliant!”   
  


Bryony just laughed at him, and then stood up on her toes to speak into his ear. She pointed at Steve, who was still stooped to elf-level, frozen in his state of interrupted rage, and Arthur’s grin somehow got even wider as he noticed him there.   
  


“ _Stevie!”_ he cried, and Steve straightened up hurriedly as Arthur stumbled towards him over the uneven floor. He was doing a terrible job not spilling the contents of his own paper cup, which Steve prayed to baby Jesus, Mary and Joseph was blackcurrant juice and not mulled wine.  
  
  
He braced himself as Arthur tripped over the folded corner of a fuzzy orange rug, and took the weight of his brother crashing into his chest with a grunt.   
  
“Steve, you’re here! I was so worried you weren’t gonna come to the party- “ Arthur began, using Steve’s shoulder to lever himself upwards from the awkward half-fall he had achieved  
  


“Arthur - “ Steve tried to cut him off  
  


“-and I barely got to see you all of christmas day, and not at _all_ today -”  
  


“Because you’ve been so _‘extraordinarily busy’_ ” Bryony piped up, making air quotes with the hand that still held Steve’s HoHo.  
  
  
Steve squashed the urge to sneer at her with significant difficulty, and made a mental note to make her shift rota as inconvenient as possible.   
  


“- and I was really worried that you were, I mean, I thought that maybe...um.”

Arthur finally managed to get his feet under him and straightened his jumper - miraculously, there wasn’t a single red stain on it, despite the perilous waving of the cup in his hand - and made a sheepish to straighten Steve’s crumpled shirt. 

He was so close to the kitchens, Steve thought in misery. He should have just asked Peter to bring him a bottle from the Rec room bar, but then he might have made something out of Steve messaging him on his off-duty hours, and he wasn't in the right state of mind to fend off his overly-friendly overtures. So here he was, exactly where he didn’t want to be.

“You thought that _what.”_ he prompted impatiently when Arthur trailed off, batting his hand away from his lapels before he made the state of his uniform worse.

Arthur hunched his shoulders inward, chewing on his lip. It was an anxious habit that he’d had since he was young and had never grown out of, possibly because he never seemed to stop being anxious, and more than once Steve had jokingly gifted him chapstick for Christmas. He glanced down to his knee, where Bryony was still standing, and as though he’d mustered some courage from the sight, swallowed and met Steve’s eyes. 

“I thought you might be angry. With me.”

Steve said nothing, watching as Arthur worried at the lip of his paper cup with his thumbs.

“About me being Santa.” he added redundantly, as if Steve might have forgotten. 

He should probably say something reassuring right now. Something dismissive and casual, then excuse himself and go to the kitchens and make for his room. It wasn’t too late to salvage his evening plans, after all. But Arthur was looking at him like he was bracing himself, and suddenly Steve felt tired all the way down to his bones. 

Steve, you deserve to be Santa.  
  
  
What was he meant to do with that? Make it into a cross-stitch and hang it on his wall like a sad consolation prize?   
  


Was he angry?   
Yes, anger was part of the weight that had been sitting in his chest since Christmas morning. Anger and frigid disappointment, and the more esoteric feeling of having suddenly been cut from a tether and left drifting, but was he angry that _Arthur_ was Santa, really?   
  
He didn’t know. He didn’t want to think about it - he had been doing such an admirable job of just _not thinking about it_ \- because he wasn’t sure he really wanted to interrogate that bitter part of him too closely. 

His little brother fidgeted in the quiet, looking more defeated as seconds passed, and Steve felt the weight of the silence that had settled in the hallway on his shoulders as the elves clinging to the walls in groups muttered to one another and pretended not to look.   
  


“Arthur-” He finally managed, and then cleared his throat.  
  


“Arthur.” he tried again, and hoped it sounded less brittle. He floundered, grasping for something to say that would make his brother stop looking at him as if he was already expecting the worst.   
  
  
“I’m not angry.”

The lie came out easier than he had expected, and Arthur looked as surprised as Steve was. Steve reached out and gripped his shoulder, squeezing once gently before letting go, and hoping that Arthur could feel the apology in it.   
  
  
“...I’m not angry with you.”  
  


He meant those words, at least. Arthur smiled at him, and sniffed.  
  
Before he could do something hugely uncomfortable like tear up or try to hug him, Steve plucked the mangled cup of mystery liquid from Arthur’s hand (“Oy!”) and inspected it critically, leaning in to give it a suspicious sniff.

“Ribena?” he said, raising an eyebrow at Arthur, who shrugged.  
  


“I don’t much like the taste of alcohol.”

Steve handed it back to him and turned sharply to Bryony instead, who was looking between him and Arthur with a watery grin. He grimaced, and then leaned down, pulling her drink out of her hand before she could come to her senses ( _"OY!!”)_ and drained it in one go, ignoring the bendy straws poking him in the cheek. The taste hit his tongue the moment he came up for air.

“Mother of _God,_ elf, this is weapons-grade, how are you still _standing_ ” he handed her back the empty wine glass and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Plucky determination, Sir!” she chirped; “You’re mixing my next one for me, drink-thief.”

“Fine” said Steve, already mentally concocting the most disgusting combination of spirits he could imagine.  
  
Arthur laughed, and suddenly he was being tugged down the corridor over the wonky, blanket covered ice towards the rec room by his shirt sleeve while his brother launched into a mile-a-minute recap of the party so far, which had involved a lot of card-based drinking games and peppermint schnapps. 

Why not? Thought Steve. He was going to get drunk anyway, might as well face the music and the unwanted commiserations on his lost promotion - they would come whether he hid from them or not, and this way he could come out of it looking less like he was sulking in his room. 

He hoped they hadn’t drunk all the schnapps yet.


End file.
